


I Still Hear Sirens

by paintedpolarbear



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Hiro Needs a Hug, Not Canon Compliant, Tadashi Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 13:48:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8982442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedpolarbear/pseuds/paintedpolarbear
Summary: Tadashi is Schrödinger’s boy, suspended in limbo both alive and dead, and Hiro can’t find the curtain to yank it back and bring him home.





	

Hiro can hear nothing except the crying of the ambulance, echoing in the narrow, rapidly emptying streets, and his own heartbeat thudding in his chest. The ambulance is in actuality silent, sitting (waiting) darkly in the bay, but its whines still splatter themselves on the inside of his skull, blocking out even the shouting of the medical techs farther down the hall and his aunt’s whispered prayers. He only knows those things are happening at all because he can’t look one way for too long; his gaze darts from hallway to doorway to Aunt Cass to the floor to the television in the corner, unplugged and black-screened. He is a fluttering, startled bird, unfocused, restless, too frightened to scream.

He still hears the ambulance because Tadashi is dying.

 

Tadashi, shattered like stained glass, lying terrifyingly still on a hospital bed somewhere down that infinite hallway, breathing through and with machines, Tadashi, whom they had not yet been permitted to visit because he was still struggling, Tadashi, rescued from the snatching jaws of hellfire but still very much in the pondering, indecisive grip of death.

 

Hiro hears the ambulance because in his mind, Tadashi is still inside it.

 

The doctor, one of the doctors that had ridden in the ambulance, comes out of the mint-green door and Hiro imagines the hallway beyond: unearthly white floor walls and ceiling, made alien in the harsh glow of cheap fluorescent bulbs, doors and windows spaced at regular intervals implying an unseen space beyond. Tadashi is behind one of those doors, in a room implied but not seen. His big brother’s existence, his life, is conjecture, speculation, a hypothesis. The mint-green door closes and the hallway, and its doors, vanish. Somehow it makes his stomach clench in panic, or dread.

 

The first words to cut across Hiro’s train of thought are: “He’s stable. You can come see him now if you like.” If you like. If you like. If you like.

 

He still hears the ambulance, but it sounds far off, now.

 

They follow the doctor into the winding maze of halls, doors blurring in Hiro’s vision until they stop at one that looks no different from the others. He imagines and is afraid for a split second that behind a million doors there lie a million parallel Tadashis, simultaneously existing and not existing until the curtain is drawn back and he resolves into one or the other, life or death. The doctor opens the door, and Tadashi becomes real. Hiro takes one step, two, into the room until he is standing exactly at the foot of the bed, and looks. And looks.

 

The fire had been so loud, and so hot, Tadashi had seemed to Hiro like a warrior crying foe to a city-devouring dragon, to a leviathan, to the sun itself. Only now he lies broken, in a hospital bed too big for him, his life etched on an EKG that loyally pulses in time with Hiro’s own heart. Tadashi’s breathing is labored under the oxygen mask, and the rest of him is drowned in white bandages that make him seem to disappear into the bedsheets. His nii-chan who was so strong and brave now looks fragile and helpless as a butterfly.

 

He hears the ambulance echoing in his eardrums because Tadashi is dying.

 

Hiro collapses onto the floor, knees and palms aching on the chill tile, heaving deep, gasping, dry-eyed breaths. Whatever is happening now, he decides, is not real. Whatever is in that hospital bed, he decides, is not real. This is a figment of his imagination, a horrifying nightmare, not Tadashi, not his brother. Because if Tadashi is here, if Tadashi is here, then why are the stars still fixed in the heavens? Why do the planets go around the sun? Hiro shivers on the floor and the earth is moving at four hundred sixty-five meters per second.

 

He hears the ambulance.

 

Aunt Cass scoops him up in arms that are stronger than they look, and murmurs softly into his hair as she carries him back outside to the waiting room. Hiro can’t cry or scream, only go along for the ride, breathing, deep hiccuping breaths that almost become sobs but don’t. She lets go for a few minutes, when they get to the waiting room, then comes back. He walks by himself to the car.

 

They go home, quietly. “They said they’d call us if anything changes,” she says, holding the steering wheel like it’s a lifeline, as if it were connected by a thread of spider’s silk back to that damned hospital, to Tadashi, and if she lets go, then his final connection to life will be lost. They’ll call, won’t they, if the tether holding his soul to his body is snapped like a fishing line? They’d call if they found pieces of it scattered on the floor around his bed, and Tadashi’s ghost screaming to be let back in, only they can’t, they can’t put him back and he has to go?

 

It’s late. Hiro is tired enough, from preparing for the expo all day and the show itself in the early evening, and then the fire, and the hospital, that he wants to do nothing but sleep. He tosses and turns. The hospital doesn’t call.

 

They go back the next morning anyway, and Tadashi looks less ghostly in the daylight, more solid. Real. He seems a little better, somehow, now that his breathing is evened out and it’s obvious he’s only resting, not comatose as they had first feared. Hiro sits in the chair by the head and puts his hand on Tadashi’s. He whispers “don’t give up,” and the “please” is understood.

 

Sometime that week, Aunt Cass drags him to the university to get registered. She takes the less-used roads that should be crowded with pedestrians, and it takes twice as long as it should have to drive around. Hiro doesn’t realize until after they get back to the cafe that she didn’t want to look at the burnt remains of the expo hall, either. He doesn’t know how he’s going to walk past it every day, when classes start. He stacks textbooks next to the bed and counts down the days until. Until what?

 

He hears the ambulance and it still wakes him at night.

 

They visit the hospital every day. Sometimes Tadashi is visibly better, the oxygen mask replaced with a cannula and the bandages removed (Hiro thinks the bandages look worse than what’s underneath), and Hiro sits by the bed and tells him how college is going, the project that he’s working on that’s going to blow everyone away, how nobody’s touched Tadashi’s stuff since he’s been in the hospital and everyone is waiting for him to come back. Tadashi made an impression on everyone, it seems, and Hiro isn’t surprised at all.

 

He never says that everyone knows him as Tadashi’s little brother, that the professors all look at him with something like pity that makes him want to throw up and cry, that he goes behind Aunt Cass’ back out to the bot fights every weekend. He knows she cries over the bills when she thinks no one is looking, and he can’t stand it when she cries. He’s learned to take a beating, to run until his lungs catch fire and his legs collapse like jelly, to hide the bruises or to sneak in the window. He sneaks small bits of money into her purse when she isn’t looking, and offers to pay for groceries sometimes. She hasn’t asked, not yet, about where the money comes from, so he hasn’t said, not yet. He doesn’t tell Tadashi that he snatches homework time in between bites, while walking to class, during the boring parts of Fundamentals of Structural Mechanics lectures (he’s got an A in that class without even trying), whenever he can, because when he isn’t in school or bot fighting, he’s helping Aunt Cass in the cafe, because hospitals are extortionists.

 

He hears the ambulance faintly.

 

Sometimes, Tadashi looks almost worse, with an oxygen mask again because he went into respiratory arrest in the night, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, breathing shallow and labored. Hiro is silent on those days and always comes home broody and irritable. Tadashi is Schrödinger’s boy, suspended in limbo both alive and dead, and Hiro can’t find the curtain to yank it back and bring him home.

 

On those days he hears the ambulance to the exclusion of all else.

 

It’s on one of the bad days in November that Tadashi wakes all of a sudden, his sharp inhale audible under the oxygen mask. Aunt Cass had stepped out only a few minutes earlier, citing the need for a bathroom break, leaving Hiro in the too-bright hospital room, alone with a still body in a white bed. Hiro is quick to grab hold of an arm, a shoulder, anything he can reach, while Tadashi drags himself upright, clutching his brother like a lifeline, whispering with a voice made hoarse by smoke and ash _Hiro thank god, I was dreaming you were burning and I couldn’t move_.

 

Hiro is crying, and doesn’t hear the ambulance.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted to tumblr on March 22nd, 2015.


End file.
